Lab 4 - Building Networks

Results from running a route on a network with historic traffic trends added.

This week's lab had us building a road network with the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension.  The road network was built twice - once with historic traffic pattern data added, and once without. 

The additional functionality was added during the network building process by electing to model traffic patterns.  Associated with the roads dataset is a set of two tables that contain historic traffic pattern data, with such information as what percentage of normal (ideal) driving speeds a particular road segment has at certain times of day, for every day of the week.  Once this data was linked to the network the overall results became more realistic. 

Not shown above are the various results obtained from making minor changes to the route start and stop times, and on what day of the week the route was created for.  The resulting route travel times changed by only a few minutes... and surprisingly so did the overall distance traveled.  These route changes were so small that I could not detect them on my network, only on the route properties screen (such as in the example shown above).